Even as Congress appears to be ending its latest standoff, Americans have grown despondent over the gridlock that has engulfed our capital in recent years. The reason for this perpetual stalemate cannot be laid simply at the feet of “partisanship.” Rather, our entire political framework is dysfunctional: We now have a European parliamentary system stuck in an American two-party plumbing.

How did we get here? Many lay the blame for the current government shutdown on the Tea Party. But the problem is not group itself. The Tea Party’s founding ideals — limited government and fiscal austerity—are important considerations in our ongoing national dialogue. Instead, at the heart of what ails the country today is the inability of our government framework to accommodate these citizens’ grievances and assign them due, if limited, weight.

The Tea Party is in fact uniquely American in its evolution: The impulse to form coalitions to protect our interests and advance our causes is stitched into the fabric of our civil life, as Alexis de Tocqueville noted more than 150 years ago. “I met with several kinds of associations in America of which I confess I had no previous notion,” he wrote, “and I have often admired the extreme skill with which the inhabitants of the United States succeed in proposing a common object for the exertions of a great many men and in inducing them voluntarily to pursue it.”

Today, however, our two-party system forces us to consider the Tea Party as a factional component of the Republican Party, even though it would no doubt be a standalone entity in any European parliament.

Sure, the Tea Party and the Republican Party share these same over-arching traditionally conservative principles, but their interests and priorities diverge quickly after that. Many Republican members of Congress privately disparage the machinations and even some of the more extreme policy prescriptions of their Tea Party colleagues, such as embracing a debt default as the functional equivalent of the American revolution, but they refrain from questioning them publicly. Due to the gerrymandering of legislative districts, House Republicans across the country are more concerned about primary challengers from the right than Democratic general election opponents.

Consider that during the last government shutdown, in 1995-1996, 79 House Republicans, or 33.5 percent of them, represented districts that had backed President Bill Clinton in the 1992 election, according to the National Journal. Today, just 17 Republicans in the House, or 7.3 percent of them, represent districts that voted for President Barack Obama in 2012. What’s more, in 1995-1996, the average GOP-held district was 6.6 percent more Republican than the national average, while today it is 11.1 percent more Republican. In other words, House Republicans now benefit more by catering to their most strident base members, such as Tea Party supporters, rather than seeking to attract swing voters.

Even if the Grand Old Party and Tea Party sought to distance themselves from one another, our existing political framework would still conflate them. It would certainly be more accurate to ascribe the designation (T-Texas) to Sen. Ted Cruz than (R-Texas). But this convention does not square with our current two-party system. Americans tend to think of that system as an indelible fixture of our democracy, rooted in the Constitution itself. The truth, of course, is that it is not, nor was it never intended to be by our founding fathers. James Madison addressed the inherent and transitory nature of multiple factions — not two static ones — in a republican democracy in The Federalist Papers No. 10, asserting, “the causes of faction cannot be removed and that relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects. If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote. It may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask the violence under the forms of the Constitution.”

Still, this is 2013, not 1787. We live in a socially networked world where political grassroots organizations digitally mobilize via Twitter and Facebook, rather than convening physically on the village green. Our country is more heterogeneous, but our voting districts are more homogeneous. We are also still emerging from the brutal Great Recession, which has laid bare many of our societal excesses and swung the pendulum back toward government welfare. In essence, we are becoming more European as our society is more balkanized into insular camps and we become more dependent on our social safety net. At the same time, however, politically we are trying to fit ourselves into the traditional American system of government — two tents that run the risk of collapsing on themselves as they stretch wider and wider to the left and the right, respectively.

Let’s face it: The European parliamentary system itself is not exactly a model that begs to be emulated. Britain, Italy, France and particularly Greece, just to name a few, often face political instability, not to mention all-out crises, due to their parliamentary political processes. By empowering multiple minorities, these governments regularly suffer from paralysis when confronted by a divisive issue. But at least their legislatures have the ability to hold a no-confidence vote and hit reset on their governments. We, instead, are frozen in our current arrangement with the theoretical opportunity to seek relief, as Madison would call it, in elections every two years.

Of course, it would be naive to think that Democratic and Republican Party leaders would risk electoral disadvantage by encouraging their more radical elements — which tend to be the most reliable voters, particularly during midterm elections — to form their own independent political organizations. The more realistic solution, although it sounds clichéd, is for our political leaders to demonstrate true leadership, which I define as the ability to get others to do what they otherwise do not want to. This may require party leaders to reject a powerful minority’s view once it has been heard. There could certainly be individual political costs, but that would no doubt be more in the national interest than letting a small faction dictate how — and whether — our government functions. The problems we face today as a nation demand leadership worthy of a sequel to President John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage. As long as politicians across the spectrum continue to game our two-party plumbing and avoid acknowledging our evolving political dynamics, our government will remain clogged indefinitely.

Stephen A. Myrow is managing director of ACG Analytics, a Washington-based policy research firm. He served in President George W. Bush’s administration, including as chief of staff to Deputy Treasury Secretary Robert M. Kimmitt in 2008-2009.